


The fantastic and terrible prophetic history of The Amazing Devil

by Fault



Series: The untested tales of The Amazing Devil [1]
Category: The Amazing Devil (Band)
Genre: Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Fae & Fairies, Other, Standing Stones, Time Travel, oak - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24181687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fault/pseuds/Fault
Summary: As you can see, they’re both perfectly ordinary humans. They met under an oak tree in a graveyard, and he reached up to her, and she reached down to him.The prophecy does not speak of whether he helped her down out of the tree, or she pulled him up into it. That’s not for us to know.But it clearly was not in 1953.We don’t need those sorts of rumours to start
Series: The untested tales of The Amazing Devil [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748950
Comments: 18
Kudos: 18





	1. Reflecting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wish to tell you a tale of The Blue Furious boy, and Scarlet Scarlet.

I would like to tell you a tale of The Blue Furious Boy, and Scarlet Scarlet. Because obviously they are both ordinary human beings. And anyone who tells you differently is spinning a wild story of fancy.

Blue has been rumoured to be a Time Lord, and a Robin Goodfellow. On other days, there are whispers that he is haunted, by wolves, or even is possessed by a ghost. And Scarlet has been rumoured to be a Dryad, a deer spirit in human skin, a faerie queen as old as the forest she strides. On yet other days they are both rumoured to be devils. 

But as you will see, they are both ordinary humans who will meet in a perfectly ordinary way. As children, climbing a tree. Perfectly ordinary, see? 

Let me explain why you may have heard rumours otherwise. 

The third time they met was in 1953, _or so she thought_. But then, she'd also briefly thought that it was the first time she’d met the Boy. Upon the full telling of this tale, perhaps you will forgive her confusion, and mine, it was a simple mistake, yet difficult to explain.

Scarlet and Blue met for the first time in a graveyard in 1996. No, actually, they’d also met for the first time once before, in 1822. But it wasn't reincarnation, I know what you're thinking.

You see, there is more I must tell of this story.

Scarlet was a young girl. This is one thing she had been told for longer than anything else. Long before she’d been told about the war, and before she remembered listening to music on the wireless and the phonograph. Before anything else she remembered and treasured, she remembered this: Scarlet was a young girl, and she should act like it. It was something she needed a lot of reminding of, it seemed. This was... understandable. For she saw worlds beyond her own in the mirrors formed by undisturbed puddles in the sunshine. So much did she see in those puddles that she would forget her place in the world, and quite often needed reminding. 

On one such day she crouched near the standing pond and waited for the picture to clear and show her something new and dear. But for the first time, a leaf had fallen into the puddle from the other side of this glassy pane, disturbing the picture. It was an oak leaf. Unmistakably an oak leaf, and it had been so strange, so very strange even to her, to see the little ripples spreading and spreading across the surface of the pond, the cause floating somehow underneath, floating upon the other surface of the water. Strange and yet, less a fearful occurrence than a fascinating one. So when she’d reached out, she'd reached right through that mirror surface and grasped the leaf tight in her hand, with intent to pull it back through for closer study. 

Her intention, but not that of the world on the other side, which having invited her so clearly, now claimed her as its own and tugged on the hand she reached through. And suddenly, she plunged into the pond. Yet somehow she wasn't in the pond at all any more, not in water any more. Her own world was unwilling to relinquish its hold on her just quite yet, so head over heels she and her leaf tumbled into the depths of the pool, but the further she sunk, the less in her own world she was. Until eventually, she was dumped entirely out into her new reality, high in the sky on that other side, whirling above the earth in a dizzying and disconcerting fashion, surrounded by nothing more than a fine spray of droplets, like she was simply an overgrown spot of rain in a cloud of multitudes. 

Because she was among multitudes. The waiting storm caught her up in its arms and tugged her away from the lingering and now illusive horror of being trapped in the depths of the standing pond. 

Storms are wild and uncaring, huge beyond mortal understanding, more powerful than human measure. This one pulled her around like a dancer flinging a rag doll about the floor with wild abandon. You probably understand that this was terrifying. It’s not every day that one tumbles right out of reality to fall into another world, only to be made plaything of by a surly weather event. 

But all was not lost. By the best of chances, she still had her leaf. That fascinating and perilous leaf that had tugged her free of her own world and into a different adventure than the one she’d thought she was embarking on this morning when she skipped down to the standing pond to look into the worlds she saw beyond its surface. 

She did the only thing she could think of, and stuffed the leaf into her mouth. 

This choice changed everything. 

The storm was not gentle. No, not it any way gentle, but in its reckless strength somewhere there was enough wisdom to heed those who are its true masters. Thoughtless and destructive and powerful as it was, it knew better than to thwart the will of faerie. For fae was the leaf, and fae was the tree it came from. 

And so the storm rained Scarlet Scarlet down, rained her down in a sunshower, right into the reaching branches of the oaken faerie tree itself. As if to say "Here, she's your problem now." 

As I mentioned, the storm was in no way gentle. So her deposition caused quite a stir underneath the tree as, water laden, they dropped their heavy load upon the unsuspecting boy below, with a noisy rush of drips.

It took her a while to notice that she wasn't alone. Perhaps you can understand why she might be too busy being dumbfounded, pinioned as she was, akimbo among the limbs of the oak, unsure whether she was entirely safe yet.

It was only when a small voice said “Hello?” that she thought to look down towards its source, finding the small face of an equally young boy looking up at her, not noticeably less shocked than her own.

..

So you can see why it was completely reasonable for Scarlet Scarlet to think that she met the Blue Furious Boy in 1953. 

Why she didn't immediately realise that she had met him before is less obvious, and perhaps requires me to tell you the next part of the story, about how they met for the very first time.


	2. The first time they met for the last time.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This part is the smallest, and the largest. For it is about life. We should all remember that that word is inextricable from death.

The first time they met was in 1822, they were bright young things and plague orphans. They fell in love under a full moon, in a London winter. 

As solace from the lack of a Christmas, they found comfort first in wine, and then within the other. Somehow from there their love grew, strong and broad as an oak. It's hard to know which parts of this life are important, the devil is in details yes, but so is the divinity. And true love surely must be divine, mustn't it? If anything is at all? 

It is important that they had a daughter together, because it was together that they helped her grow up strong and kind. As is the way of things, she was the most beautiful thing in the entire world to them, and whether or not the world agreed with that sentiment was never recorded deeply on their hearts. 

He died in 1868, and she in 1879. Though that detail isn't recorded on their hearts, that's what the lines carved into the headstone tell the Blue Boy, when he's older. They never had another love in their lives to compare to what they had for each other. None held a candle to what they saw in the other. They were the loves of one another's lives. A rare and precious thing, and one which even more rarely they never wasted.

They were buried in a single plot in a sprawling graveyard in a place known as Newcastle upon Tyne, a grave watered by friends and family, the family their daughter brought into their lives after plague stole their own away, so young, back in Newcastle. That may have been the end of their tale. Returned together, to the earth that supported their every step and breath until they were no more. 

That may have been their entire tale, if it were not for their headstone. It did not just record their details because a human hand had carved them, no. Blue and Scarlet could not have met for the first time without that particular stone recording the last time they met beneath it, when she was buried there with him. 

For this gravestone has a history of its own. If they could not have met for the second time without meeting for the first, it's also equally true that they could not have met here for the second time, without meeting there for the last.

That is the part of the tale I shall tell you next, but first I must get my notebook. 

No, not because I've forgotten the details, I know what you're thinking. It's more than it seems. As everything is, once you look closely enough, and know how to listen well to its story.


	3. The second and unending meeting of souls.

That headstone is more than it seems, as so many things are once you get to know them. Blue and Scarlet met in a graveyard for the second time when she was stone and he was an acorn. 

No, that's not quite right.

You see, this is where the story grows in the retelling, if you'll forgive me the expression. This is where that Robin Goodfellow rumour comes into play most loudly. 

This us the story of the gravestone. The one held by the roots of the faerie oak.

As most are, the gravestone is made with repurposed stone, stone that was excavated at another time, and had another life before this onr, if you'll pardon the expression. This particular one is made of unusually old stone, though. A stone older than runes. The mason never did understand how he had broken his tools on it as he carved it. But the stone did.

You see, the stone was ... local. Taken from the peak of Dunston, where it had stood an age, had lain since before the forest grew around it. Since before the triskelion had reached these shores. Since before the Irish Elk whose antlers raised the sun into the sky tossed it's head from atop the Dunston hill, and made its way down towards the distant river, made its way down from the height of the midsummer sun. 

Perhaps now is the time to tell you that the word Dunston comes from another age, and from a language that did not see colour as the English language does today. At that time, Dun equally found meaning as dark or brown or grey might do for us. What concerned the speakers of the time was the nature of the light striking against the stone. Did it sparkle or shine smooth, did it mirror or glare bright? This stone did none, and so it was dun. The dun stone. Textured through and through with such matt darkness, it was truly dun, even standing as it did, under the eye of the midsummer sun. 

The Irish Elk wandered not in forests as we know them. So when dende forests and humanity sprang up around them, these giants retreated, to poorer pasture and past the stone, past and away into the Summerland, the faerie realm that came and went in storm and moon, and when night bled into day and the light played tricks upon the eye. It came and went marked by the dun stone, the standing stone between the worlds, niw swallowed by the grove, that spirited the Irish Elk away, to leave only the red deer and the roe, who yet dreamed of a time when the sky was held high upon those broadest pair of antlers, high above the peak of the dun stone hill. 

I say Irish Elk, but this creature was not an elk nor was it particularly Irish, but it was a type of deer, cousin to the fallow deer. A truly massive cousin who grew the greatest pair of antlers to ever grace the Earth. Antlers, those annually deciduous bones, grown by the creature whose heart was strong enough to lift the sky upon their tines, until midsummers height. 

Why do we call it Irish Elk then? Newcastle is far from Ireland, achingly far as the winter wind whips. Once upon a time there was another name, a name that lies buried three languages deep, within the soil of Britain's isles. A name from when there was but one language spoken across every isle, spread thin and lightly upon the land, as humanity was at the time. Not the smothered world you see now through the coal haze of English. A name now known only to stones and the hearts of deer.

This has been a quite winding path to bring to the moment that the standing stone was toppled, and hauled away from its sentinel post. But how can you know the stone, if you don't know what it has witnessed? The final thing it witnessed was to be its own destruction, by cleaving and by carving. Forced into shape fit for a Christian burial ritual, down across the river, in a graveyard flat upon the earth, in Newcastle upon Tyne. 

Now that I have told you this, perhaps you may understand how the second time they met they were not human. They were an acorn and a shard of stone. Two separate pieces of an immortal otherworld, meeting in such a literally mortal way. Bound together by the sparkling tears fallen from the eyes of a puck, who planted them there together, and watered them with the wine of sorrow.

Bound by stone and earth and wood and wine, by earth and air and tears and words. Two different types of shard, ready to become witness to a thousand years, so long as one remains witness to the other.

A Puck is a feeling creature, of song and wine and merriment. A broken standing stone is too large a tragedy to remain unmourned by their kind. And so when that first shard cleaved from its source, it was given a piece of faerie forest to become it's companion, to weave together two new fae spirits, bright against the darkness of the dun stone on the flat earth.

But doesn't this mean that Scarlet and Furious are possessed, or haunted, by these faerie souls they took into themselves? Doesn't that mean they are a sort of dryad? From that time their souls were twin desires of spreading roots and climbing limbs? These desires twined one around the other, equally as they twined around that removed unmoving stone? These desires that became leaves on the wind, acorns on the ground? 

This is all I have gathered. The acorn was planted by a puck. Who was visiting the fallen shard of a standing stone, once a portal to an Otherworld where song flowed like wine, and wine like sunshine, and sunshine like a calming warmth, among the strains of love and life that floated in the wind.

Planted to mourn a different age, a different place, a different light. And that was perhaps where that story would have ended, if the grave they marked was not rooted deep and dreaming into the very human love of two orphans buried intertwined, within that plain of soil. If that sparkling shining singing love had not been brought above again, up into the sunshine, drawn high into the alchemy of the leaves, like water from the ground. To form acorns of its own.

But that fae acorn was planted. So it became the standing stone of that single true and human love. To be spoken of by those oaken leaves, rustling in the summer breeze. If one only has the ears to hear this love in those rustling whispers.

And the Blue Boy does. He’s a perfectly ordinary human boy who waits beneath this faerie tree, listening to the stories he hears softly, so softly in the leaves. Well, you might say, ordinary human boys don’t hear such things. Neither did he, when he first came here. But he’s been waiting here no time at all, and before time had name, and also, since 1953. The whispers of the past among these leaves told him so, that he has been waiting here since 1953, and also since 1868. And also since he was 3 years old, and in a moment unguarded by his parents, ate an acorn that had fallen from high above, a sort of solid secret, laying hidden deep in the branches of the gravestone oak. 

One leaf also fell that day, pulled free by passing winds to fly high into the sky above and away, to whence he knew not then. 

Nothing happened immediately, nothing you wouldn't expect to happen when a 3 year old boy eats an acorn he found on the ground. But by the next time he returned to play in the graveyard beneath the spreading tree, that oak spoke of the love buried beneath it. Scattered broken pieces of story told in dappled notes of sunlight, peeking through the rustling of those broken oaken leaves. Such things happen when one grows an acorn in one’s heart, dropped from a living faerie tree, grown upon the standing stone of a portal to a time when two people met under a full moon in winter, and fell in love. Fell in love so long and so deep and so true, that it stole the heart of the standing stone and of the faerie oak. And made that heart their own. 

When you have such an acorn grow in your heart, you are not possessed, you are not haunted, you have another heart laid over yours, like a winter quilt made of forgotten souls. Weaving beautiful pictures of long lives entwined with one another, like century old oak tree roots around a graven stone. 

That is how the Blue Furious Boy came to have a soul of three parts. Old, and ancient and new as dew. Fresh as flowers and as dry as stone. Solid as oak and dancing like sunlight on leaves. Calm as woad and as furious as the sea.

Or at least, that is this part of my fantastic prophecy.

Next time I shall try to bind the final strands, of this Celtic knot of fate, that endless knot that is the meeting of Scarlet Scarlet, and The Blue Furious Boy. For there is more to this tale, and after all, aren't you wondering how the notebook comes into this?


	4. How it begins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final part of the story how The Blue Furious Boy and Scarlet Scarlet met.

Now it’s time to paint the final points of context for how these perfectly ordinary and normal and not fantastical people met, for the third time, or the first. Depending on your perspective. 

Is it the perspective of the red girl, reflected through the standing pond? Who fell into the sky and landed on the other side as a faerie kin, high in the branches of the graveyard oak? Is it from the perspective of the blue boy who ate the gravestone acorn, and waited for more than his life over again, hearing pieces of story from the past, as his heart grew fae and wild? 

Is it from the perspective of the standing stone and the oak? Meant for one thing, and captivated by another, by a human love. Much as the leaf captivated Scarlet as it floated on the Other surface of the pond. As they accepted one another, as they began to understand. What it meant to be other half of such a pair. Stone and acorn, fae and human, eternal and living. 

The Blue Furious Boy and Scarlet Scarlet. There are other names for them, wilder, and older, buried deep in the bones of the world. And more human ones too. But these are the ones we use here, in this tale.

You may note that I did not say male and female. What fool would ever want to contain their souls in such confines? I am a fool for many things, but I am not fool for that.

People may wonder why there has been no ceremony to bind these two together, so they may grow old side by side as it appears they are destined to, all things considered. But in a way, they already have. The stories they have grown together are already bigger than either of them. And that is no good reason to bind wild spirits.

There are other reasons too. Best known to them, and to them alone. 

For not every story is for telling. And not every happy ending has golden rings. Do not ask them, for it is not for us to know, and the fae kin dislike having to lie at least as much as they enjoy spinning songs.

And that is how The Blue Furious Boy and Scarlet Scarlet met. When he was 3 and she was 8, when they were young and free in London, and when they were naught but the souls of realms. When the songs of the Summerland were heard by human ears, and the future seen in reflections. When there was dun stone, and sunlight reflecting on water. When the stag raised the Sun to its zenith in Summer, and the world spun upon the silver of the sky.

The girl who sees prophecies in puddles, and the boy who hears stories of souls in susurrus. Who met for the third, and second, and final time, under an oak tree, in a graveyard, in Newcastle upon Tyne. During a sparkling sun shower, or a dun storm, depending on your perspective. 

Or at least that's how the story goes. But ask yourself, how could I know? How could I know any of this? Given that I stand with feet bloody and blood mongrel in an Empire riven land on the other side of the world? How would I be lucky enough to have a notebook of such secrets, a Victorian notebook of pressed leaves? A folio, if you will. With leaves all from one oak tree, their aging veins leaving marks upon the pages. The cover made of deer hide, and the pages bound in with sap. How would I see stolen moments in the life of a graveyard oak, bound around a headstone, grown in the low lying river plain, of Newcastle upon Tyne? Who am I to interpret the fantastic and terrible prophetic history of The Amazing Devil?

But I digress.

Perhaps it was the first time they ever met, two children in a graveyard oak. Because after all, the human element in any story is the heart of it, dear hearts. And as you can see, in my tale they’re both perfectly ordinary and existing humans. They met in the dappled shade of an oak tree in a graveyard, and he reached up to her, and she reached down to him. 

The prophecy does not speak of whether he helped her down out of the tree, or she pulled him up into it. That’s not for us to know.

But it clearly was not in 1953. 

We don’t need those sorts of rumours to start. 

..

There are many threads of this story that lead into the indistinct distance still.

For instance, what are the stories lying under the gravestones hewn from the rest of the standing stone, after that first broken piece, that allowed these two to meet? Perhaps if you listen to the songs of The Amazing Devil, you will hear echoes of those stories. Perhaps not. Tell me, have you ever eaten of an oak, grown upon a graven stone, marking the rest of one true love, on the plains of Newcastle upon Tyne?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The are a thousand more stories to tell, for this is simply how the two primary colours met. I haven't even touched on how the band formed. Let alone where the violin comes from. Or how they bound the skin onto the drum, and where that skin came from.

**Author's Note:**

> This is not supposed to be real person fiction. I don't do real person fiction. This is supposed to be a love letter to the creative brilliance of The Amazing Devil. 
> 
> Any details that resemble real human beings living or dead are wholey by chance. This is a fiction about Stage Personas. 
> 
> This is about the idea of the characters who sing the songs of The Amazing Devil with a thousand voices of the dead. Tales lit into life brighter than bonfires by those awe inducing voices, those hypnotic rhythms and harmonies. 
> 
> This band rips holes in my soul to let the light shine through, and I don't know how else to express my thanks for that, inappropriate though some find it.
> 
> Go check them out if you haven't: https://theamazingdevil.com/  
> Maybe buy an album on bandcamp.


End file.
